Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5) Read online

  A sense of elation had found its way back into his person. His body, so long deprived of these neurochemicals reacted strangely, as if trying to shake off a fever. He had been suffering hot and cold spells for some time, even paradoxical aches and pains and waves of exhaustion he was just too numb to sense before. His eyes felt dry even in humid air one minute, and unable to focus past all the hyper-secreting tear ducts the next. He pushed on past his own Lazarus project, realizing these sensations were to be expected in a man whose soul had been so long dying inside his own body that stirring to life again was sure to feel a little strange.

  ***

  Griswald attached his recalibrated mind wave device to a shoe salesman at The Walk Shop in Berkeley. He snuck the miniaturized unit onto his key ring, after essentially picking his pocket. It didn’t help that his sheer presence tended to shock people out of their daily stupor, the semi-trance state they were walking around in secondary to boredom and soul-crushing routine. He had a mug that looked molded by a frying pan. His skin was pale with a dull sheen owing to excessive oiliness, and spotted with yellow blotches. People usually jumped back a few feet when turning about to find him in their personal space.

  ***

  The following day Griswald returned to find the shoe hawker standing at one of two counters, a line nearly out the door. The poor salesman to his right, working his own counter, had no one willing to buy a pair of shoes from him. Devotees of Griswald’s manufactured guru were so star-struck they used their time waiting in line to pick up more boxes of shoes, figuring it would get them more time before their “master.”

  Max Faverly, the salesman selected to play the part of insta-guru, did nothing but gently shake the hands of his customers, and make simple statements like: “Those shoes should complement that dress just wonderfully.” “What lovely feet you have!” “Where would you recommend going on my lunch break?” Everything coming out of his mouth was reinterpreted as proof of his enlightenment, of living the simple life without pretense, and of confirmation of the angelic glow only certain devotees could see with their naked eyes.

  These “chosen ones” were hungry to impart this knowledge to others standing in line beside them as proof they were ascending in Max’s presence. Were it not for his nametag, Griswald figured Faverly would be Zen Master With No Name, as the analytical faculties of his customers were sufficiently diminished in his presence it was doubtful anyone would have thought to ask for it.

  Griswald sat at the back of the store, where he could monitor Max’s influence from a more objective perspective, out of the range of the device’s effect. What really moved Griswald most was watching Max hand over wads of money to his co-worker, so he’d feel better about himself. His customers did the same, modeling their actions on their guru.

  “Maybe we could all go volunteer at the soup kitchen,” Max said. Griswald had no idea how Max could come up with an idea out of the blue like that, except, perhaps as one more sign insta-guru was the real thing. Business women in three-thousand-dollar suits, wearing Prada purses and shoes, blindly followed him alongside CEOs and COOs, who had flown in at the urgings of their colleagues, and were now standing in line and calling everyone they knew. For people whose careers depended on boosting sales, Max was now a worthy subject of study for entirely mercenary reasons.

  Following the entourage toward the soup kitchen, Griswald then lingered far to the back. His eyes intermittently drifted up to the TV in the corner. The nightly news on the CNN Tech channel was easy enough to tune out, until it informed him of Dr. Freidkin’s brainwave device that was apparently able to prolong concentration and boost memory. You didn’t even have to wear it, just sleep with it. With a rising sense of panic over the possibility of being swallowed up by history, Griswald succumbed; he surrendered all scientific objectivity.

  He raced home, threw up the engineering schematics of his little device on the internet for the world for free, and proceeded to wear the key ring himself. He even slept with it. It was never away from his body. It could only help improve his thinking, after all; prophets and sages were reputedly the most lucid people on earth. And the device would serve magnificently for multiplying his disciples, who he could more easily convince from guru-state to wear one of his key rings to help spread the gospel according to Griswald.

  While it was still too early to discern the long-term implications of his radical approach, he had to admit, he felt a little like that guy who’d jumped out a window saying, “So far, so good.”

  THIRTEEN

  Drew caught Robin gaping at her eating a sandwich with a knife and fork, the equally refined manner in which she handled her wine glass, and table napkin. It seemed more than the usual longing to make up for lost time. “You shouldn’t swoon over my cultural sophistication.”

  “Why not?”

  She smiled. “I think your willingness to explore life with an open mind is a better survival tool.”

  “Say that to the geniuses dropping dead like flies from over-exertion and countless missteps on their way to becoming all they can be.” When Drew’s eyes went to Robin’s PDA on the table, he slid it into his pocket, in effect confessing it was the latest headlines that had set him off. “If the best and brightest of us can’t get over themselves in time to crawl out from under the rubble of a crashed world economy, who am I?”

  “I still say you have a better formula for success.”

  Robin twisted the spaghetti around his twirling fork haplessly. “I think we all have a self-destruct mechanism inside us that is the first thing to surface under pressure. Most people find it long before they discover the missing ingredients to success.”

  Drew, not to be done in by Robin’s mind-centering ritual with the twirling fork, started folding and refolding the napkin in her lap until she could think of the right thing to say. “I can’t tell you how many books I’ve read on the secrets to success. You know what they all say? Know thyself,” Drew said, slicing into her sandwich. “There’s only one way to do that and that’s with a little distance on yourself, enough to shine a bright light on the dark spots in your mind before you accidentally trip the self-destruct switch.”

  “You saying I think so little of myself I have the healthy distance I need?”

  Drew laughed. “I’m saying your humility helps. The fact you won’t stop asking questions, not this makeover, not a hundred makeovers from now. How do you think the phoenix endures the fire except by constantly reinventing himself? By always asking, what can I do better today than yesterday? There’s no end to better.”

  Robin harrumphed. “We’ll see if these pearls of wisdom come to me in the heat of the moment, or if they’re forgotten along with everything else.” He brooded in silence, looking up to see Drew smirking at him. “I guess it can’t hurt to have my own coach to keep me in the game,” he said.

  “That’s right, and don’t you forget it.”

  Drew set down her knife and fork with impatience. “Robin, you’re not all callow on the inside. You see things in people even I miss. One day you’ll be able to cash in on your piercing insights into human nature. The more suave you is in there; it’s just looking for sufficient enticement to take center stage. You’re too unwilling to surrender your bright-eyed wonder at life to give him his chance under the spotlights.”

  Robin snorted dismissively, but Drew knew her words had struck a chord.

  “I still don’t know what else to make of those Indian college students who took their lives.”

  “I’m sure they thought it was all about smartening up. Maybe if we were ten times smarter than we are, we could better wrap our minds around this world. It’s an easy myth to fall privy to, maybe because there’s some truth in it, like the best of legends. But we won’t get through these best and worst of times, as Dickens would say, by simply growing a bigger brain.

  “We’re gonna need a bigger heart too; man’s humanity has to keep pace with his technological capability; you’ve heard that one before. And the rat race,
doesn’t get any more meaningful just because you can run that spinwheel like a hamster in a cage any faster.

  “Still, it’s an information age, and day by day there’s more of it and less we can process. That means that what we experience of the present is a vanishingly small percentage, until it gets to where we’re marooned from time, cast off from the present moment like an orphaned child.

  “If you can’t perceive history as it’s happening, how can you be a part of it, far less help shape and guide it? And the answer isn’t handing over control to some supercomputer in the sky that’s quantum measures of profound beyond our capacities, a kind of Terminator or Eagle Eye scenario.

  “Don’t fool yourself, the big picture is made up of lots of little pictures. We’re each part of that supercomputer in the sky, our intelligence, our intuitions, our guided and misguided views of the world. That kind of superintelligence comes about like we’re doing here, through social intercourse, through debating the nature of life not like some esoteric practice suitable only to philosopher kings, but as a basic human right, hell, a basic human need.

  “The most important social issues of our times go without any discussion or debate. They fail to rise in people’s consciousness to where they’re even aware of them. Fear shuts down the topics before they get too far, fear we just can’t cope, it’s just too much, what can one person do?

  “Easier to shut the mind down than rise to the challenge of grappling with these insurmountable issues, or better yet, let’s put them off on the shoulders of our politicians to deal with. Who else has the time? And let’s be surprised when they abuse that kind of power because the part is trying to do the job of the whole. Because there is nothing so corruptible as a handful of humans with human failings.

  “But what if everyone were watching everyone else, not just the authorities with all their spy cameras? What if we did become our brothers’ keepers? Then we’d have no choice but to participate in life in a far more meaningful way than we ever have before, to raise the most important issues of our times from oblivion into public discourse.

  “And if everyone’s thinking about this stuff, if everyone’s informed about the most pressing issues, then no one can pull the wool over your eyes, can use sound bites and disconnected bits of information to blow our minds by reinforcing the idea that none of it makes sense, so best we keep our heads in the sand, leave it to supercomputers and super smart people in Washington to figure it all out; you can just bet that’s what they want.

  “We need a Socratic age of debate that turns the least of us into a Plato of old. That way no one can screw with us anymore or bend us into anything we don’t want to be bent into.”

  “That’s your explanation?” Robin said. “That these times are mind blowing because we’re intellectually lazy, because we don’t have enough heart to inquire into what’s really going on, either, because caring is just too damn exhausting? We stop thinking, we stop seeing, we stop loving because they’re perishable resources and we need to save our powder for ourselves?”

  “That’s precisely right. That’s why when things get this bad we need to stop talking about our humanity and start talking about the God within, that fountain of youth that perennially refreshes and keeps us young and vital, so that the more energy we expend, the more we have, the more we care, the more we can care, the more we think, the faster and more agile our minds become, not the more worn down.

  “It sounds like another paradox, and life’s full of them. But it’s nothing that saints and sages haven’t been saying for generations. If you want it, you have to give it away. The swimmer doesn’t swim so he can become tired. He swims so he can become a better swimmer.”

  Robin stared at his empty plate. “How did you manage to finish that sandwich while talking and not getting any of it in your teeth?”

  “I’m truly gifted. I thought that was self-evident.”

  Robin laughed. “Not your best monologue, by the way. But not exactly subpar, either.”

  “I’m glad you’re becoming a better connoisseur of them. What’s the point of being worshipped if the eyes of the beholder are inadequate to the task?”

  “I appreciate your perilous predicament.”

  It was Drew’s turn to smile.

  ***

  Robin watched Drew from the upstairs window of their house, as the day went by, mow the lawn, trim the shrubs, put a designer touch on their landscaping. Fix the lawn mower when it broke down. Wash the car. Do an oil change on the car and a tune up.

  Out the back window, later in the day, he watched Drew stow her rifle and clean the deer she’d hunted in her work shed. After that, she brought in a basket of vegetables plucked from her garden. She cleaned the house with zeal. Prepared a meal with the deer meat and vegetables. She even took time out to fix the wiring when the lights didn’t come on over the food preparation counter.

  Is there any part of life that woman hasn’t perfected?

  Robin busied himself instead with his homework, books pulled from Drew’s bookshelves on psychology and philosophy and sociology. Drew spotted him periodically looking up from his books in the living room, feeling frustrated, and read him like a book.

  “Robin, you’re slowly awakening from a lovely dream about life,” she said, wiping her hands with the dish rag. “One in which everyone is colorful and exotic and friendly and fun and worth exploring, kind of like being at the petting zoo. It’s an enviable state, perhaps even a sacred one, only seeing the best in people.” She set down the rag and sipped her wine. “Now that you’re starting to sense some of the ugliness out there…” They both watched as Robin’s PDA vibrated with the latest incoming SMS texts of crimes registered in Robin’s precinct. “…Some of the things you were blinded to, it’s only natural that you distance yourself a little from life for a time.”

  “Seems like I should be more like you, if I want to embrace life at a deeper level.”

  Drew engaged the stereo to help calm Robin’s anxieties with some lovely piano music, set softly, so she could talk over it. Maybe she was giving herself time to change tack. “Nietzsche argued in his Will to Power that individuality starts with saying, ‘No.’ No, I’m not this, I’m not that. All the activities that absorb me probably would be an unwise distraction for you at this stage of the game.” She flicked on footage of the Winter Olympics training camps where skiers were rehearsing their jumps years in advance, so she could watch it from the kitchen, the audio muted. The judges were also assessing the snowboarding events. “You’ll circle around, give it time. First you have to climb the mountain for the big picture view, then you get to come back down, join the rest of us in the thick of things, while trying not to let go of that context you got at the top of the mountain.”

  “I guess.”

  Drew added for his benefit, “You may yet surpass me one day. Just have a little patience with yourself.”

  “I’m off to such a late start, feels like I have less time to master everything, not more.”

  “Sometimes you have to go slow to go fast. You should pick up a book on Zen paradoxes.”

  Robin looked away. Drew sensed he was being a little dismissive, so she sweetened the bait in the trap. “Some of those books on Zen talk about pretty miraculous things. Zen masters who are able to be in several places at once.” The wok sizzled as she tossed in a handful of vegies. “Others who can levitate.” The wok crackled with the addition of the next handful of ingredients. “Some able to defend against entire armies with thought projections.” The wok flared with the cup of diced onions. “All manner of miracles. Of course, no one has seen such things for hundreds of years. Just reports, always second hand.”

  Robin laughed. “If you’re trying to motivate me to get through the day, I’d ask you to set my sights a little lower.”

  “If you don’t reach for the stars, where are you? Left with a stiff neck and an inability to look up, that’s where.”

  Robin stifled a smile and returned to his reading.
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br />   FOURTEEN

  Stan was doing his part, pretending to be dead. Because he got nightly practice, it was a role he played well. The better he got, the more Lorena showed her appreciation by allowing him to dip his stick in the sacred well of renewal.

  She scrolled down her iPad, selected an auspicious video link on the Tech News website, then piped it over to the fifty-inch monitor, brushing the hair out of her eyes.

  “Griswald Cunningham,” the headline news anchor reported, “reputedly at work on a brainwave machine, died last night. It is believed, in an attempt to rush his product to market, he subjected himself to clinical trials for undue lengths of time. Greater specifics are not known at this time.” Turning the page, “In a related story, three East Indian science students were found just barely alive in their flat surrounded by DNA synthesizers. It is believed they were working on the latest smart drug and grew overeager to test results. We have to warn you, the next footage is quite alarming.”

  The cameramen spared no amount of choice angles to play up the horror. The bodies looked ravaged by a virulent mold that incapacitated them only to eat them alive. The victims succumbed finally despite resuscitation efforts of paramedics on site. Stan had seen better looking bodies dug up in Egypt after three thousand years. “While it is premature to speculate,” the news reporter stated, “the incidents involving Griswald Cunningham and the team of Indian scientists appear to be part of an alarming trend.”

  She muted the broadcast. “Tomorrow today. Can we sell it or can we sell it?”

  Stan opened his eyes to take in the images on the monitor for himself. “Innocence and gullibility are our friends.”

  “I tell you, they never see it coming,” Lorena said, riding him in a rhythmic fashion. Stan kept his body rigor-mortis rigid, so her derrick-like drilling drove his entire body into the mattress evenly, not just his waist. It added to the illusion; this poor stand in for necrophilia-induced narcotic highs.